BT Loses Case Over Hyperlink Patent

Tarkie sent in this Bloomberg blurb noting that British Telecom has lost their patent suit against Prodigy over an old patent that BT hoped would cover the use of hyperlinks on the modern WWW. See our original story or check out the court's decision.

Comments

Well, good.

[MaxVlast]

I think anyone sensible who saw their claims shook his head in wry humor.

Not Invalidity but Internet does not infringe

[legal_tinker]

Note that the opinion does not invalidate the patent. Rather, it says that Prodigy (and the Internet writ large) do not infringe the patent because the Internet does not have a "central computer" or contain "blocks of information" as the court defined them and the patent requires.

Lost on SJ

[Shadow Wrought]

Not only did they lose but they lost on Summary Judgement. Basically a SJ motion happens midway through the case when one of the sides moves for the judge to rule in their favor. In essence they are saying that the other side has nothing. It occurs in almost every case and is rarely granted in whole (typically it will make smaller parts of the case go away). But to lose it all on SJ means that they really did have squat, and that there was no point in continuing on. Cool.

Entertaining court decision

[HuguesT]

I never tought that such a thing would be possible, but the court decision is actually a good read.

If I understand correctly, BT's patent describes an old system whereby `continuous blocks of information' stored in a databased on a central `system' can be accessed remotely via telephone lines. The interface allows for accessing the data on the system by chunks. The users somehow selects a menu or a link when they want to access the next bit.

The court comprehensively dismissed all parts of BT's infringement claims.First the Internet is not a central system, second a central database is not accessed (the judge writes that the Internet is in fact the very antithesis of a central database), next the data on the Internet is not in the form of blocks: HTML is far more flexible than what the BT patent describes, and finally the concept of hyperlink is far more advanced than what BT described in its patent (basically a `give me the next bit' button).

At some point during the trial, BT's expert tried to submit made up web pages that conformed to what the BT patent was describing. The judge found that totally unconvincing, writing `a device does not infringe because it can be made to infringe'.

In conclusion, the jugde writes `In contrast to what BT would have us believe, there are no disputed issues of material fact in this case'.

Let's hear it for the court today.

Re:that's not really a complete analysis

[rgmoore]

I find it interesting, of course, since DNS is not the only address translation required. Before reaching the end server (and the patent says, "Central computer"), an ARP translation will be required as well to translate an IP address into a MAC address for transit across the physical+datalink layers of IP.

Actually, the judge did mention several additional levels of translation required. He mentioned that the web server needs to resolve the relative address in the the URL into a local address by looking up the base directory in a configuration file, and then needs to ask the OS to find the actual physical track and sector where the file is located. (Apparently the BT people specifically said that a complete address would have to include track and sector information!) He didn't even get into the idea that in many cases the data sent out isn't even a file at all, but is generated dynamically by the server.